this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2025
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WHOOOOOA. If Linus is not mistaken (doubtful), there wasn't an intrusion in the repo, or there wasn't some fucked up merge somewhere, this is crazy as hell. This is a huge deal. Good on Linus for catching it.
If you read the whole thread, it turns out to be an undesirable behaviour of a tool called b4, which was rewriting not just author information but committer information. The consensus seems to be that this tool needs to be updated not to do that.
It was in fact a microscopic deal. Linus overreacted. Lemmy and Reddit milked the drama.
Linus' tone was disproportionate, but he wasn't wrong. This could easily have been a compromised account trying to sneak code into the kernel.
His tone is almost always disproportionate. It’s just who he is.
If it was compromised account trying to sneak code into the kernel, the attacker wouldn’t rewrite history since that would be obviously flagged when Linus tries to merge the pull request; as demonstrated by Linus in fact noticing the rewritten history. There was virtually no chance that this was an attack.
Well, that's kind of his personality though. Just reading the message it seemed like quite an event though. The mailing list is generally very transactional and uneventful.
Yes. Linus is known to overreact and use colourful language.
Linux Torvalds / Tim Apple
Pam from The Office: they are the same (picture)
Sorry, couldn't be bothered to fire up a meme generator for that joke